Last May, a woman slowed down for a traffic accident on I-95 in Delaware, and saw something a bit odd: a man running away from the wreck tearing his clothes off and hitting himself. It turns out that the wrecked truck was carrying some 20 million honey bees from Florida to Maine.
These bee-carrying trucks are responsible for some $15 billion of the U.S. economy (they add $15 billion in value to U.S agriculture). Put another way, the crops that depend on bee pollination - like apples and broccoli - account for about $40 billion worth of agriculture. And the majority of those bees live on trucks.
So why all the fuss about bees? Because for years they have been mysteriously dying off. But now, they may be making a tenuous comeback. And the crazy part – the thing that makes it a risk to the economy – is that no one really knows why they were dying or why the crisis appears to be abating.
Starting around 2006, bees started abandoning their colonies and dying off. It was called Colony Collapse Disorder and to this day, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, no one really knows what’s behind it.
Initially, some scientiests thought this nomadic lifetsyle might be contributing to bee losses. But while the bee-truck industry hasn’t slowed, bee losses appear to have. Last winter, the U.S. lost 23.2% of its bees. That’s down from a 30.5% drop the year before and blow the 10-year average of 29.6%.
This could be thanks partially to private industry. A growing number of companies are pushing to expand beekeeping past just trucks and farms. Take urban beekeeping, for example.
It’s not just urban hippie types putting hives in their backyard, she says. Bees actually survive better in urban environments than rural ones. There’s an entire Ted talk on the subject. But as O’Leary sums it up, bees “like more stuff” and there’s a variety of plants and flowers for bees to choose from in cities.
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